Template talk:User Vandalized

Self-referential vandalism?

If your user page is vandalized such that the only vandalism consists of incrementing the counter of the number of times it has been vandalized, does that count as vandalism?

This has me in a quandry. Suppose your vandalism count is 10. An IP vandal comes in and changes it to 11. Well, if that's not vandalism, then the count is wrong, and it should be reverted back to 10. But wait! In that case, it was vandalism, after all, so you should put the count to 11. But... then it wasn't really vandalism, was it? So it should go back to 10, in which case it was vandalism, and it should go to 11.

My brain hurts. TJRC (talk) 17:51, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

That's a good one. The only way to circumvent the paradox that I can find is to claim that by default any change to a userpage by anybody else than the user is vandalism - and that's a debatable claim. --Thrissel (talk) 11:29, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

I agree that not every change by one editor to another's user page can be called vandalism, but I think we can use a nice philosophical distinction to solve this paradox, by invoking intent, and separating the act from the result. If something is done to one's user page (or any page) with the intent to vandalize, then the act counts as vandalism even if the result is not itself vandalistic. I encountered a similar situation a couple of years ago. A user made several vandalistic edits to several different articles. All of the edits were obviously destructive or disruptive, but in one instance the edit was the deletion of a hatnote from an article that, as it turned out, should not have been hatnoted in the first place. Again, although the act was vandalism (in the context of this editor's other edits), the result was not. So, if someone other than you increases your vandalism counter by one when no other vandalism has occurred, then that action is still vandalism even though the result is not, and the incremented number is correct.--ShelfSkewed Talk 17:33, 7 June 2010 (UTC)